Renovation Final Accounting

OK, all the bills are in and I finally have a picture of the total, final cost of our renovations. You can jump to the end if you want to see the gory details right away…

Recall that we did the following:

Moved the water heater from the laundry room to it’s originally plumbed location in the middle of the house and updated it to a tankless Rinnai heater:

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Updated the master bath from

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to

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And changed the master bedroom window from

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to (and painted the room and trim)

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and added end tables

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Updated the guest bathroom (sorry, no good before pix )

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Updated the Laundry room to get rid of the partial wall hiding the water heater and replaced the floor, repainted the wall and added wider shelves:

I can’t BELIEVE I don’t have a decent before shot, here’s an in-progress picture to try to give an idea of how it looked before:

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and after

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Plus:

– New dresser for the master bedroom

– Can lights in the great room

– Accent lights in great room (on dimmer)

– Can lights in the kitchen + re-zoned the lights so that 3 areas of kitchen are controlled separately.

– Lighting fixture in the dining area (on dimmer)

– Added a fan with a timer where there was none in the 1/2 bath

– Routed all exhaust fans out through the roof (rather than into the attic as the existing ones had been set up)

– Sealed the accent tiles on our patio which were crumbling due to moisture / freezing. Tommy found a great sealer for this. We’d already tried to seal this ourselves with one recommended by the stone folks.

– Created support for gym window-mounted air conditioner and cleaned, re-aligned windows

– Swapped out all switches and outlets in hallway and master bedroom for “Decor” style versions

– Replaced most hinges in house with brushed nickel ones. Painted some that we could get away with.

– Installed those cool magnetic door stops

– Pressure washed the exterior of the house

– Lots of little fixes as they found things that needed fixing

– Relocated outlet, phone and satellite coax outlet in TV room into closet so we could start new project of updating that room

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Note that most lighting in our house, that is NOT on dimmers, is compact flourescent. I’m just waiting for dimmable CFs to replace those remaining ones but there are plenty of times you want a low light (late night, early morning) for ambiance.

The final cost?

We had estimated, with generous buffers, that this was going to cost us about $36,000.

The total actual cost was…. drumroll … $58,700. This is very close to the 50% MORE that you are warned that such projects are going to cost than you estimate so we were not overly surprised. Having folks in the house who have the skills to effect relatively major changes in short order is very tempting and we did succumb to the temptation on several occasions where we realized that we would REALLY not be happy if we didn’t pursue a particular trail. i.e. we originally did not plan to do ANYTHING with the laundry room. But once the reality of the void of the hot water tank presented itself we realized that it would make no sense to leave that room looking so shabby. Similarly, decisions were made throughout the project – adding a fan to the 1/2 bath, having custom end tables made, etc. that we did not plan for originally but made a LOT of sense while we were in the midst of things.

Ask us if we would do this again if we knew what we know now and I’d say “Definitely Yes”. Everybody we worked with was great. Tommy and Larry are two highly skilled, competent and reliable masters of their respective crafts. They had many practical suggestions when we were venturing into new territory (for us).

Most of the other folks we worked with were brought in on Tommy’s recommendation and we were comfortable with everybody we worked with being both in our house and working with our wiring /plumbing / cabinetry.

The electrical work was done by Wayne of Precision Electric Co. (770-207-1444)

And the plumbing work was done by Northlake Plumbing Service, Inc (770-921-2046) these folks we had the least contact with as I needed to be out of the house on business but what I did see I was comfortable with.